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UC-Villanova Rock 'N Roll Party

An
at-large NCAA tournament berth looks completely out of the question now. I'm
still surprised the Bearcats are being mentioned as one of the last four teams
out on some well-respected web sites, but after losing tonight for the sixth
time in the past eight games, I just don't see how UC can leapfrog so many
other deserving squads.

That, in
my mind, leaves one option. Win the Big East tournament. Is it possible? I'd
say it'll be close to impossible. But UC's players wouldn't say it quite like
that. Instead, they're hanging their hat on Hawaii
and the way the team played during the Maui Invitational in order to survive
the rigors of New York.

Remember
that stretch three months ago? Beating a couple top-25 teams in Vanderbilt and Maryland before narrowly
losing in overtime to Gonzaga? How well the team played together? The
expectations that trio of games set off (at least temporarily)?

Deonta
Vaughn thinks the team can return to that mindset when the Bearcats journey to New York next week (after, of course, playing their
regular-season finale at Georgetown
on Saturday). He believes the team can, in a manner of speaking, go back in
time.

"We can
still use that; we know what we did over there," Vaughn said. "We watched film as
a team in Maui. We saw how we were playing. We
were all one. Nobody was getting mad at each other because we missed a shot.
Hopefully we'll get back to it when we get back to New York."

A nice
sentiment, but is that really reality? Can anybody really see this team - one
of the worst 3-point shooting squads in the country with an offense that doesn't
score enough points - winning four-straight games at MadisonSquareGarden?

I guess
it doesn't really matter what you or I think. Mick Cronin and his players
believe they can. I asked Cronin how the team can do it. After saying the team
just needed to win, I pressed him a little more. Better shooting? Better
defense?

"Here's
the biggest thing we talk about," he said. "When we struggle to score, that's
when we have to get defensive stops. You have to play better defense when you
struggle to score. I've been part of a lot of teams that have 25 or more wins.
Look at Villanova, on nights when they don't make shots, they've still found a
way to win. When they were scoring in the second half to get that lead, that's
what hurt us. We were missing a lot of open shots, but you have to hang in, and
your defense has got to keep you in there. That's where our defensive fortitude
has to come in."

After the
game, Cronin talked about how proud he was of his team, about how it continued
to fight hard against the ninth-ranked squad in the nation.

"We had
every opportunity to give in tonight," Cronin said. "We had tough calls go
against us. We couldn't make a shot for a long period of time. But we continued
to battle back against one of the best teams in the country. It's a pretty
simple game. One team was making open shots and the other team was not."

The
Bearcats will need to start to have any hope for the NCAA tournament.

--Nice
effort from Deonta Vaughn. Though he only managed four points in the second
half, he finished his Senior Night with an 18-point, three-assist performance. We'll
miss him in the media room. Always willing to take questions, always willing to
give the best answer he could, always pleasant to be around.

"He's a
great player," Cronin said. "He gives everything he's got every night out
there. Great preparation for this game. He showed he had great leadership in
the locker room tonight. We would have loved to have gotten him a great win.
It's nice to have somebody compete so the younger guys, like Cashmere and
Jaquon, can see the way Deonta is competing out there and how hard they're
going to have to compete to play in this league."

Villanova
adjusted to his first-half production in the second half, making more of an
effort to deny Vaughn the ball and using 6-foot-5 Reggie Reading to guard him.

"They
figured out, on the pick and roll, to hurry up and come up with a trap so I
wouldn't beat the man to the basket," Vaughn said. "They started to try to do a
little more denying. We know what they were going to do. We knew the gameplan
and we made the extra pass. We just couldn't make the shot."